U.S., NATO Units Top W. German Terrorists’ Hit List

U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization military bases and soldiers top the hit list of West Germany’s most-wanted terrorists in the revolutionary Red Army Faction, the nation’s top prosecutor said Wednesday.

“The security situation regarding the Red Army Faction is as ever tense. It is important that the security arrangements for target figures and target objects should be kept as comprehensive as it is now,” said Kurt Rebmann, West Germany’s chief terrorist hunter and federal prosecutor.

Rebmann, whose intensive search for members of the ultraleft-wing terrorist group has been stepped up on orders of Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann, said U.S. and NATO military targets and “the military machine” in general remain most at risk of attack by the organization, originally known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

“The RAF is as dangerous as ever,” Rebmann said at a press conference in Karlsruhe.

He said the group also threatened the German armaments industry, justice, security and police officials as well as politicians, whom it views as “the leadership of the counterrevolutionary war.”

Split Into 4 Groups

Rebmann said he believed the left-wing group is split into four sections, headed by a 20-strong group of active terrorists who live underground. He said another section consists of logistics groups who live in normal society but perform organizational and support functions.

A third section, he said, is organized in the prisons among terrorists already caught, and a fourth section consists of fugitives who are charged with political agitation and the welfare of those in prison.

“Logistically and personnel-wise, the Red Army Faction is still in a position to mount terrorist attacks against specific targets in line with its concepts and plans,” Rebmann said.

Zimmermann released figures last week saying that security officials credited the group with 21 bombing attacks, including several on NATO oil pipeline targets, in the first six months of 1985.

The faction’s last major attack on a U.S. target was an attempt in December to blow up an American-run NATO army officer school in Oberammergau, Bavaria. It was foiled by a guard who spotted the bomb in a parked car.

The authorities thought they had broken the back of the radicals with a wave of arrests in 1983. But late last year, it became clear the group had reorganized and was again a force.